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Re: S500 suspension airmatic leaking?

Re: S500 suspension airmatic leaking?

The S500 are plagued with problems. I wish I would have read some of the boards and bulletins before I purchased it. The stock suspension is over engineered and ridiculously unreliable. Its only consistency seemed to me was that is was CONSISTENTLY VERY EXPENSIVE to fix. I finally did some homework about passive coil spring conversions for the suspension. That brought me to several different companies. I then did homework and research on EACH of those companies to educate myself on the available options. I ended up buying a conversion kit from Strutmasters.com - Everyone had tried to talk me out of it because they said that coil spring rides are too rough and not comfortable. If I wanted a comfrotable, smooth ride, I would have to stick with air. Today, I couldn't DISAGREE more!!! I found that I actually PREFER this ride to the old stock suspension ride. Its comfortable and plenty smooth. Here is the link if you are interested. http://www.strutmasters.com/Mercedes-S-Class-Air-Suspension-Conversion-Kit-p/-mb-4-s500.htm I didn't get the sale price that I just noticed they are running, but even at full price, for ALL FOUR WHEELS.. it was a bargain to never have to worry about my suspension again. My research showed me that Strutmasters doesn't reheat, cut or modify the steel in their springs (which will weaken them).. they are powder coated to strengthen them and made in America. A lifetime warranty came on the kit (which is more than I can say for ANY Mercedes OEM part) I have been on the new suspension conversion for almost a year now and could not be happier!!! I hope this helped. Good Luck. For the record, my service manager actually told me that "when you buy a Mercedes Benz, you are buying luxury not perfection"... how am I buying luxury if they are using substandard parts that a prone to failure and unreliable?!?!?! What is SOOO luxurious about being inside of a Mercedes repair shop so often I feel like I should be clocking in???

Re: S500 suspension airmatic leaking?

Re: S500 suspension airmatic leaking?

I have a 05 Mercedes S500 and I converted my air system over to a conversion kit from strutmasters after i kept having problems with it. I got tired of spending so much money.. One of the greatest decisions Ive made in a while. y'all should definitely check them out. that lifetime warranty comes in handy.

Read this before that StrutMasters Conversion!!

With all due respect to GreasMunky and HaroldGene (looks like they were lucky on their conversions), the StrutMasters passive coil conversion is far short of the slam dunk they say it is. Listen to my story and proceed with caution, and/or get some better guarantees out of StrutMasters!! I was looking at thousands of $$ to fix the air suspension in my 2000 S500 (and that was just for the front), so I researched conversion options (having done one in the past on a Lincoln I owned). Because of positive feedback like some of these in this thread, I pushed my mechanic to use a StrutMasters conversion over the manufacturer he preferred to use. Total of $1600 to convert over the entire car and, while I considered it a good move, the car did sit slightly higher and the ride did get slightly stiffer, but nothing to give me any regrets. Then we picked up a couple people at the airport a few weeks later, who sat in the rear, and found that the rear end bottomed out with a loud clunk whenever we hit any kind of bump or road seam. When we went back to StrutMasters, they acknowledged that they knew they had a problem in the design of the rear coil/strut assembly and had received multiple complaints of bottoming out. Imagine that - they shipped me parts knowing that they were having a design problem! That's when we found out how good that warranty was...yeah, they agreed to send new parts for the rear (which they weren't sure was going to be the final solution!!), but reminded us their warranty is only a parts warranty - so they would not pay for the labor to do the changeout or for the new alignment check that must be done. In response to my concerns over being in an experimental "do-loop", they offered to bring my car to their HQ (in same state) and use it as the prototype for the final design solution. They failed to return repeated calls on the status of this, and finally just shipped a pair of bigger coils to my mechanic (i.e. no new struts!), who now had to disassemble the original strut/coil assemblies they sent and press on the new coils to the old struts - and I get to shell out more $$ for the labor and alignment. That was just done, so we are now about to find out how well this solution performs...both on bumps and on the quality of the normal ride (i.e. stiffness). I'll keep you posted, but in the meantime - BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!

Strutmaster Fix Complete

I'm happy to say the new rear coils have eliminated the bottoming out, and have also made the ride better...I just wish StrutMasters would have been more honest with us that they knew there was a design problem, and not just ship parts known to be inadequate...so we are happy with the suspension now, BUT...the warning lights for the airmatic system come on all the time, so the circuitry to trick the system to not throw off error messages is not working...mechanic is trying to get to the bottom of this with StrutMasters now...hope all this info helps the next convert from having these issues!
Rich

Originally Posted by ppmaravich

With all due respect to GreasMunky and HaroldGene (looks like they were lucky on their conversions), the StrutMasters passive coil conversion is far short of the slam dunk they say it is. Listen to my story and proceed with caution, and/or get some better guarantees out of StrutMasters!! I was looking at thousands of $$ to fix the air suspension in my 2000 S500 (and that was just for the front), so I researched conversion options (having done one in the past on a Lincoln I owned). Because of positive feedback like some of these in this thread, I pushed my mechanic to use a StrutMasters conversion over the manufacturer he preferred to use. Total of $1600 to convert over the entire car and, while I considered it a good move, the car did sit slightly higher and the ride did get slightly stiffer, but nothing to give me any regrets. Then we picked up a couple people at the airport a few weeks later, who sat in the rear, and found that the rear end bottomed out with a loud clunk whenever we hit any kind of bump or road seam. When we went back to StrutMasters, they acknowledged that they knew they had a problem in the design of the rear coil/strut assembly and had received multiple complaints of bottoming out. Imagine that - they shipped me parts knowing that they were having a design problem! That's when we found out how good that warranty was...yeah, they agreed to send new parts for the rear (which they weren't sure was going to be the final solution!!), but reminded us their warranty is only a parts warranty - so they would not pay for the labor to do the changeout or for the new alignment check that must be done. In response to my concerns over being in an experimental "do-loop", they offered to bring my car to their HQ (in same state) and use it as the prototype for the final design solution. They failed to return repeated calls on the status of this, and finally just shipped a pair of bigger coils to my mechanic (i.e. no new struts!), who now had to disassemble the original strut/coil assemblies they sent and press on the new coils to the old struts - and I get to shell out more $$ for the labor and alignment. That was just done, so we are now about to find out how well this solution performs...both on bumps and on the quality of the normal ride (i.e. stiffness). I'll keep you posted, but in the meantime - BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!